Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute..

Reason: Of the ’90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven’t really gotten their due?

Rosenberg: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The tech industry and indeed the online world have very little memory of history. One of my purposes in writing the book was to get it down while it’s still fresh in my mind, everyone’s still around to interview, and the pages can still be hauled out of the Internet Archive.

The Web moves really quickly, and we’ve had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they’re doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the ’90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

Rosenberg criticizes mogul Barry Diller for suggesting that talent remains the one scarcity in today’s media. But this book is a glitteringly subversive argument against Rosenberg’s own thesis. It’s a beautifully written and meticulously fair narrative about the past, present, and future of the blog. Only somebody with Rosenberg’s incomparable ability could have written Say Everything. We are lucky to have his unique talent.

My point about Diller, of course, was never meant to suggest that talent is or has become widespread or universal. Rather, I took issue with the media exec’s smug attitude that the old world he inhabits already does a thorough job of locating and rewarding talent. But, er, I’d be foolish to argue too strenuously here!